The greatest rivalry in golf began on a nine-hole course in the Ohio countryside

If Palmer hadn't chosen golf as his vocation, he most likely would have become a commercial pilot. At first he was scared to death to fly. Once, when he was an amateur golfer en route to Chattanooga on a DC-3, he was startled by a ball of fire rolling up and down the aisle.

"I immediately found out that it was static electricity," Palmer says, "and that's when I decided I would learn to fly and understand what was happening."

He overcame his fear out of necessity — he wanted to spend as much time with his family as possible and driving from Tour stop to Tour stop was no way to accomplish that. So he earned his pilot's license.

Over time, the only thing that Palmer loved as much as the sight of his ball soaring toward the green was the sight of a plane streaking through the sky.

Palmer flew into Athens with his wife, Winnie. Swearingen picked them up and drove the Palmers to the home of Finsterwald's cousin Jean Sprague, where they would spend the night and then rise early on the morning of Thursday, Sept. 25, 1958, when Arnold would pay tribute to his good friend and play golf with Jack Nicklaus for the first time.

Swearingen would plan the day around a parade and a match involving two two-man teams. The fourth competitor was an amateur, Howard Baker Saunders, a six-time Southeastern Ohio Golf Association champ out of nearby Gallipolis and a top player on the Ohio State team 15 years before Nicklaus would fill the same role. Saunders would've turned pro if he hadn't suffered from osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone that left him with a bad limp. With one leg shorter than the other, Saunders wore one shoe with a five-inch heel to level his playing field.

Court Street was packed for the morning parade, as Swearingen, a sporting-goods retailer and local football referee, celebrated his own birthday with a gift to Dow: a July Fourth-worthy supply of marching bands. The route was less than a mile long and yet stamped by so many monuments to Americana — a family department store, a courthouse, an armory, a car dealership, a bookstore, Swearingen's store and the bars that were forever kept busy by hard-partying Ohio U students.

This could've been a homecoming football parade. Finsterwald, Palmer, Nicklaus and Saunders rode in their own convertibles, tops down, waving like returning war heroes at a delirious crowd of 1,200. The mayor presented Finsterwald with a key to the city. Speeches were given, autographs were signed, pictures were taken. Michael DiSalle, busy running a successful campaign for the governorship of Ohio, joked that he had picked the wrong day to come to Athens.

No politician could match the golfers' star power. And nobody cared that more people had come to see Arnold than to see Dow.

When the hourlong ceremony was complete, Swearingen had the golfers go fishing before it was time to head to the club. He grabbed some rods out of his store, gave them to Finsterwald, Palmer and Nicklaus, and steered them to a pond full of catfish.

Finsterwald and Palmer knew their way around the hills and streams of Appalachia, "but Jack was a city boy," Swearingen says.

Jack cast his line over the hillside and got it caught in some rocks. He refused to go down and loosen it — he was afraid a snake might be waiting for him.

"No, Jack wasn't roaming any hills in Columbus," Swearingen continues. "The only hills he ever roamed were at Scioto Country Club or in that real nice suburb of his, Upper Arlington."

Over time Nicklaus would grow sensitive to any talk that he was a rich daddy's boy, especially when the talk was inspired by Palmer's past. Arnold was the son of a greenkeeper, the sod-stained child on the other side of the country-club grass. People adored his Horatio Alger tale and assumed that Nicklaus had never spent a day of his youth with any tool in his hands that didn't come out of a shiny new golf bag.